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Title: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries) by Stephen Burn ISBN: 0-8264-1477-X Publisher: Continuum Pub Group Pub. Date: June, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An Illuminating Guide
Comment: If Infinite Jest has become the Ulysses of the late twentieth century, then this excellent guide is the equivalent of Stuart Gilbert's companion to Joyce's masterpiece: Burn offers a lucid unravelling of some of the more mysterious aspects of Wallace's book (what exactly is up with Hal, where the mastercopy of the film is at a given time), but he also demonstrates fascinating parallels with books like The Golden Bough that I'd never thought of. It's also mercifully free of the kind of esoteric literary theory that spoils so many literary studies - refreshingly Burn prefers to situate the novel alongside the work of writers like Jonathan Franzen, and William Gaddis.
The book is short (you sometimes get the feeling that Burns wants to say more but doesn't have space) but within those limitations this is a fine study of a terrific novel - highly recommended.
Rating: 2
Summary: what is good is not original; what is original is not good
Comment: At just under ten dollars, you might be a bit shocked to receive this eighty page guide if you buy it online instead of at a bookstore. Does Stephen Burn make good on his dime-a-page reading of Infinite Jest?
IJ garnered together a huge amount of fanatics on the internet who, over a couple of websites (easily found on google) have dissected and analysed great chunks of the novel. The W.A.S.T.E. group (of which I am browser, but not a regular contributor) in the middle of a huge analysis.
Given this source material online, I had hoped Burn's guide would provide a short overview of some of the larger critical issues in IJ and -- perhaps -- a glossary of characters and references; even though I'm on my second time through IJ, I still come across characters that I should know, but don't.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Burn's writing style is near-unreadable. Not impenetrable-profound, but just very poorly written, full of generalities, rhetorical questions, and empty rhetorical gestures. Multiple pages are spent discussing the act of writing the critical guide itself; it seems that Burn is quite interested in dancing a few of these rather empty 1980s-vintage critical games, and much less interested in getting to the bottom of IJ. The nearest relation to Burn's writing is the eager undergraduate's essay: short on substance, long on talk.
In fact, a great deal of the book is spent in these moves; after a rather top-heavy, paint-by-numbers job summarizing "postmodern" fiction, Burn spends precious little time coming up with insights into the nature of IJ. Those "insights" he does come up with are a stretch at best -- for example, he spends a great deal of time linking the date of the founding of Enfield (Nov. 8) to the invention of X-rays, his evidence being a later mention of "X-ray specs" (and Burn's own enthusiasm.) This kind of shoddy "scholarship by hunch" sounds like it was written three hours before deadline; Burn would have better slimmed his work down to a long-form review in a literary journal. (It is possible that Burn's, being from the UK, is unaware that X-ray specs are a running joke from their days on the back page of Captain America comics.) Indeed, Burn's book makes good on the adage "what is good is not original, and what is original is not good."
There *are* some good bits of criticism to be found, but most of it is available online (Burn, of course, does not deem online resources worthy of inclusion in the bibliography, so one is left to believe that he came up with the same ideas coincidentally; were he an undergraduate, I might worry about the fact that he comes to many of the same conclusions about the 'grand design' of IJ as do many of the easily found online guides, but neglects to mention or cite this.)
Burn's bibliography is very scant, and misses a few vital articles, including Daley Hagger's Harvard Advocate review of IJ which was probably the smartest one to come out in the first few months after publication. Burn is very dismissive about online resources, keeping them out of the bibliography; he is either hiding his reliance on them, or just too snobby to consider them worthwhile.
Don't waste your money on this kind of hack-work; go online and find the much more detailed, much more honest, resources that critics and fans have made available for free.
Rating: 2
Summary: a nearly unreadable guide
Comment: At just under ten dollars, you might be a bit shocked to receive this eighty page guide if you buy it online instead of at a bookstore. Does Stephen Burn make good on his dime-a-page reading of Infinite Jest?
IJ garnered together a huge amount of fanatics on the internet who, over a couple of websites (easily found on google) have dissected and analysed great chunks of the novel. The W.A.S.T.E. group (of which I am not a member!) in the middle of a huge analysis.
Given this source material online, I had hoped Burn's guide would provide a short overview of some of the larger critical issues in IJ and -- perhaps -- a glossary of characters and references; even though I'm on my second time through IJ, I still come across characters that I should know, but don't.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Burn's writing style is impenetrable. Not impenetrable-profound, but just very poorly written, full of generalities, rhetorical questions, and empty rhetorical gestures. Multiple pages are spent discussing the act of writing the critical guide itself; it seems that Burn is quite interested in dancing a few of these rather empty 1980s-vintage critical games, and much less interested in getting to the bottom of IJ. The nearest relation to Burn's writing is the eager undergraduate's essay: short on substance, long on talk.
In fact, a great deal of the book is spent in these moves; after a rather top-heavy, paint-by-numbers job summarizing "postmodern" fiction, Burns spends precious little time coming up with insights into the nature of IJ. Those "insights" he does come up with are a stretch at best -- for example, he spends a great deal of time linking the date of the founding of Enfield (Nov. 8) to the invention of X-rays, his evidence being a later mention of "X-ray specs" (and Burn's own enthusiasm.) This kind of shoddy "scholarship by hunch" sounds like it was written three hours before deadline.
There are some good bits of criticism to be found, but most of it is available online ... Finally, Burns' bibliography is very scant, and misses a few vital articles, including Daley Hagger's Harvard Advocate review of IJ which was probably the smartest one to come out in the first few months after publication.
Don't waste your money on this book; go online and find the much more detailed, much more honest, resources that critics and fans have made available for free.
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Title: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0393003388 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Infinite Jest: A Novel by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0316921173 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Future of Fiction, A Forum (Spring 1996) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 156478097X Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Understanding David Foster Wallace (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) by Marshall Boswell, Matthew J. Bruccoli ISBN: 1570035172 Publisher: University of South Carolina Press Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0316925284 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 02 February, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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